14th April 2015 Lloyds Banking Group shareholder Michael Page may be about to force some accountability, and perhaps even a degree of honesty, at the state-rescued bank in which he owns a stake. In doing so Page — whose Guernsey-based aircraft leasing business was left massively out of pocket following the collapse of the scandal-plagued, and HBOS-backed, aviation business, Corporate Jet Services, in […]

March 11th, 2015 Britain’s banks would never have been able to get away with behaving as badly as they have, to missell as many financial products or ruin as many viable business customers if their sector had been subject to proper competition, the former entrepreneur-in-residence at the Department of Business Innovation and Skills, Lawrence Tomlinson, has said. […]

February 14th, 2015 (updated February 20th, 2015) Hervé Falciani is the man behind the largest leak in banking history. In this interview, filmed in February 2014), he told the British filmmaker Nick Francis why he had little choice but to become a whistleblower after he discovered that the board of directors of his employer, HSBC, was allegedly […]

February 7th, 2015 As a U.S. Federal litigator, Bill Black had a pivotal role in ensuring that hundreds of the bankers behind the U.S. savings and loan crisis of the late 1980s were put behind bars. Since then, he’s become increasingly exasperated by his country’s failure to prosecute any senior bankers for the much more serious and more damaging […]

January 23, 2015 (corrected March 2, 2015. See note) When John Griffith-Jones and Martin Wheatley, chairman and chief executive of the Financial Conduct Authority, appear before the Treasury Select Committee at 9.30am next Tuesday, 27 January, the 13 MPs on the committee have an unprecedented opportunity to establish whether the FCA, just like its predecessor the FSA, is colluding with banks to cover up […]

November 12th, 2014 This is brilliant off-the-cuff reporting by Paul Mason, economics editor of Channel 4 News. It’s all very well for the Royal Bank of Scotland’s chief executive Ross McEwan to claim to be angry that some of his bank’s traders rigged the FX markets in order to rip off the bank’s clients and counterparties. But I […]

November 12th, 2014 Guest Post by Rowan Bosworth-Davies One of the major unexplained elements in the foreign exchange (forex) rigging case is the level of knowledge of manipulative activity possessed by the Bank of England. If it, as a leading market participant and a regulator, had prior knowledge that the forex markets were being manipulated, or […]

October 2nd, 2014 This is easily the best Danny MacAskill video ever. I particularly like the bit where the fearless stunt cyclist is perched on top of the Inaccessible Pinnacle, adjacent to the summit of Sgurr Dearg. The seeming nonchalance with which MacAskill climbs the “In Pin”, as it’s called, with his bike on his shoulder, and the […]

September 16th, 2014 In an interview broadcast on BBC1 earlier this evening, David Dimbleby asked Scotland’s first minister, Alex Salmond, for his views on possible currency and financial market turmoil in the event of a “Yes” vote in the Scottish independence referendum. Dimbleby was implying that, in the event of a “Yes” vote this Thursday, markets will […]

September 16th, 2014 (last line edited September 17th, 2014) Martin Wolf repeats a number of fallacies about Scottish independence that have long since been disproved in the debate he has missed, writes Professor David Simpson The only positive message to be taken from Martin Wolf’s article, published in last Saturday’s Weelend FT, (“What happens after a yes […]